One Beautiful Tern

[Ashutosh Sinha]

Forster's Tern

Spec : Canon 40D, 400mm f/5.6L, ISO 250, F5.6, 1/2500s; Set Manually; No processing except cropping and some sharpening.
Location : Shoreline Lake; Mountain View; California;

Terns are one of the most elegant and beautiful bird. You can't go wrong with any photograph of terns but photo that does justice to them are not easy to make. How is my effort, I would like to know your opinion? Please, please don't tell me it is no good because of the head angle :-(. It looks OK to me, not great but OK. It took me more than two weeks of effort to get the photo with the fanned tail :-).

I tried linear burn to get more details out of the whites but I did not like the result. It did not produce much detail in the whites and made wing tips darker. I am sure fault was my lack of experience in post-processing. Any suggestion for improvement? Noise, Color of the sky etc. etc.


Unfortunately for uploading photos only 800pixels are allowed in vertical dimension compared to 1024pixels in horizontal dimension. Somewhat unfair for vertical compositions :-(.

[Ákos Lumnitzer]

Exposure is perfect. Love the spread tail and wing position. A slightly better HA would have been incredible! Still love it as is. :)

[Harshad Barve]

nice pose and agrred with Akos
TFS

[David Fletcher]

Wonderful pose and details in this. HA mentioned, but all else pretty well nailed. Congrats.

[Ryan Lambert]

Lovely spread of wings and tail here, HA mentioned but not a huge nit, exposure well handled but maybe could do with a bit more detail in the blacks...congrats

[Doug Brown]

Hi Ashutosh. Your perseverance is admirable, and your dedication and hard work paid off here. Love the fanned tail and the nice banking pose. The head angle could be better, but you already know that. I'd like to see a 4x6 crop with slightly more room at the top and bottom. Also, I'd bump my ISO to 400 or more and stop down to f/7.1 or f/8 with this much ambient light. The extra DOF and sharpness may not have made a difference in this particular image, but it's a good strategy over the long haul.

[Ashutosh Sinha]

Thanks for the compliment Doug. It is very difficult to get both the fanned tail and the head angle. When they are foraging along the edge of the lake they cover a small area, 100 feet or so, at any point of time and try to defend it from other terns. When they reach at the end of that area they turn back. When they are turning back they fan the tail and give the banking pose. You get split second to photograph this pose. Unfortunately they turn back towards the water i.e. away from you so you can't get both this pose and head angle :-(. You have to pick one of the two. I will prefer that tail spread with OKish head angle, I just love that tail :-).
My camera body, canon 40D, will produce lot of noise at ISO 400 and beyond so prefer to stay below it. I will take your advice and try to use f/7.1 next time.
Next time I will keep calculator handy while cropping to get the 4x6 format.